My January TBR dispatch for those with pre-2020 attention spans

A periodic list of quirky Wikipedia pages, hardhitting journalism, delicious longforms, jarring opeds, quickread books, and silly multimedia to add to your monthly #ToBeRead

I don’t know about reading, but I’m pretty damn good at collecting tabs of articles I want to read. Each occupies all but 1cm at the top of my screen as I snack away on YouTube commentaries and food review vlogs till I fall asleep. But every once in a while, driven solely by desperation to close out tabs to make space for new ones, I read.

This is a list of some kickass bits and pieces of writing I’ve read (and re-read) in the last few weeks. If you read even a single one of these top to bottom, I will consider this dispatch a success and will send out monthly lists as a moral obligation. Maybe it gets me back into reading too. So please write in to tell me you read something if you do? Thanks, njoi.

These just in

Read my fresh new pickings from this week to feel like you’re fully up to date on the world (alternatively, you could spend 27 mins on Twitter):

1. ‘Why Do Men Find Comfort in Samay Raina's 'India’s Got Latent'?’ by Pratyush Parasuraman for The Hollywood Reporter. Parasuraman asks a timely, necessary, almost existential question. As a fraction of online India embraces IGL and another fraction scoffs in contempt, this piece questions if these fractions are decided by gender, how much space women get to hold in the ‘edgy’ contours of Indian comedy, and why men instinctively jump to preserve these unequal spaces. “Have people found what they were always looking for - that same edgy façade to couch what is familiar and comfortable, to be around mostly men? Men who are tired of the social demands that respectability makes on them and so resist with humour.” (Read)

2. ‘I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers’ by Rebecca Shaw for the Guardian. A scathing piece on how fully-grown, rich, influential industry leaders are an embarrassment to the human race with strong recommendations to ‘bring back bullying’. “I have been prepared for evil, for greed, for cruelty, for injustice – but I did not anticipate that the people in power would also be such huge losers.” I do wish this was funnier and more nuanced, but I’m glad someone said it. (Read)

3. ‘India Built a Perfect System to Ignore Its Deadly Air. (It's working.)’ by Samarth Bansal and Anushka Mukherjee for The Plank. A revealing (and hard-hitting) tale of India’s clean air efforts and why they have failed us, glaringly and repeatedly. “Cities can control dust. They can’t control the system that produces pollution. So they chose to measure what they could manage, rather than manage what they needed to measure.” (Read)

4. ‘Agony of being a Muslim in Modi’s India’ by Kalim Ahmed for Maktoob. A chilling, grim, and rightfully aggravating memoir of a Muslim researcher and journalist who used to document religious hate crimes. “Living in this kind of fear doesn’t just change your behaviour, it changes the way you see the world. Every decision, no matter how trivial, feels fraught with the possibility of violence, misunderstanding, or worse. It’s a constant negotiation between staying true to your identity and staying safe.” (Read)

5. ‘The Lynchian Look’ by Guy Trebay for the New York Times. A quirky ode to the legend: his hair, fashion, smoking addiction, and how it all translated to screen. “If fashion designers especially responded to Mr. Lynch’s cinematic vision of small-town America as a place both reassuringly familiar and intensely strange, that, too, makes sense. He was among those directors who built characters directly through costume.” (Read non-paywalled link)

6. ‘Buried alive? The surreal story of how COVID took over a remote city in the Amazon’ by Japhy Wilson for The Conversation. An absolutely bonkers story of a small Amazonian town where COVID-19 awakened class consciousness and, er, the dead. “But Uncle Covid is still celebrated in the slums of Iquitos, where he has come to symbolise the rebellious survival of the poor, who refuse to be defeated by a cannibal capitalist system that trades in the air they breathe and reduces them to trash.” (Read)

Wiki Shuffle

Here are some of my favourite totally random pages that I have landed on and enjoyed reading after hitting shuffle over a trillion times on Wikipedia (can you tell I’m unemployed?):

1. Timeline of the far future. Very cool stuff. You would expect the moon to explode 25 years from now, but scientifically, not many palpable changes will occur to our planet until a few thousand years later. Although… the timeline states it will take our coral reefs 2 billion years to completely recover from human-caused ocean acidification. NGL, I was a happier, brighter person before I read that. We fucking suck.

2. Infinite monkey theorem. A pretty robust mathematical theory suggests that a monkey hitting keys at random on a keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, including the complete works of William Shakespeare. OK.

3. Bunkers in Albania. This is a laughably tragic comedy of errors. A narcissist ruler leading his country to almost permanent economic ruin because he wanted to build cool war bunkers. Now they litter Albania, unoccupied, dirty—some becoming cafes, others, love shacks.

All time hits

Longforms that stand the test of time. These are few I have revisited this month (I occasionally wake from deep sleep thinking about a cool thing I read once: these below are a few I can remember). Not an exhaustive list at all, and I am planning to spread these over the next few dispatches. Please relish.

1. ‘Collision’ by Bhavya Dore for FiftyTwo. Twenty-four years ago, two burning planes plunged into the mustard and cotton fields of a Haryana village. It changed the way we fly. Chills, dread, tears, hope. What a ride (miss u 52). (Read)

2. ‘ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web’ by Ted Chiang (yes, THE Ted Chiang) for The New Yorker. OpenAI’s chatbot offers paraphrases, whereas Google offers quotes. Which do we prefer? The only work you need to read/know/discuss/share/post/repost/cite about GenAI. (Read)

3. ‘Did the moon sink the Titanic?’ in the Sky and Telescope Magazine. Exceptionally strong tides in early 1912 may have brought the iceberg into the doomed ship’s path. Everything you need to know about glaciers, currents, tides, and tragedy. (Read)

4. Congratulations, you have (hopefully) read something! To celebrate, here is a game that is sure to drive you insane. Absurd trolley problems by Neal.Fun. (Play)

That’s all folks, happy reading! Once again, please tell me if regular dispatches will help you sneak back into a reading habit. They sure will help me. #ReclaimAttentionSpans2025

Love, D